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Is there a famine in our future?

When we start putting food in our gas tanks, we know Americans would rather drive than live.

“We’re having a world-wide food crisis,” murmured the New York Times. The rest of the media took their cue, as they usually do, and headlined the new event.

The Los Angeles Times put it this way, “Vegetable oil isn’t a crime—is it? Diesel owners who switch to cooking grease can run afoul of the law. Just ask the governor.” The state wants its tax on alternative fuels just as they get it from the sale of gasoline.

Drivers, in all the esoteric places, are converting their cars to run on used cooking and frying oil. Some restaurants that once found it a burden to dis-pose of used fry-oil are now thinking of charging for it.

But, of course, the 800 lb gorilla in the world is Ethanol.

The fear of oil peaking has caused a stampede of biofuel production across the world in the frantic search for a substitute.

As Wikipedia defines it, ”Biofuel is a solid, liquid or gas fuel derived from recently dead biological material, most commonly plants…distinguishing it from fossil fuel, derived from long dead biological material.”

Brazil is currently the world’s leader in ethanol production. The chippie is sugarcane. It grows like topsy in that part of the world. Imperial systems were founded on it. Sugar and rum were the chief exports from the Caribbean and South America to Europe during the colonial period. Every sailor on the slave ships that plied the Atlantic to the Americas has his ration of rum.

In the United States, ethanol is made principally from corn. Its development has been a bonanza for the American corn conglomerates. The largest producer of ethanol in the U.S. is the Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) that touted itself, for years, as “Supermarket to the World” in TV ads.

ADM is an agricultural giant. It has made profits of $10.98 billion in 2006, and operates in North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Pacific Rim. The company has a transportation network that circles the world capable of delivering ethanol just about anywhere.

Included in the agribusiness cabal is Monsanto reporting a net income this year that more than doubled the earnings in 2007, from $543 million to $1.12 billion.

The earnings of Cargill, another cabal member, soared by 86 % from $553 million to $1.03 billion in one year.

Any wonder, the cost of food, everywhere, is going through the roof?

Staples like wheat, rice, corn and beans, what most of the people of the third world (and other world’s, too) live on, are out of reach for many. As of March this year, wheat and maize prices were 130 and 30 percent higher, re-spectively, than a year earlier. Rice prices have more than doubled since late January

The food price index of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization rose by 9 percent in 2006 and 23 percent in 2007. While millions are being driven toward starvation, giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits.

In typical corporate style, with no concern for the lives of people, specula-tors have turned the growing worldwide food shortages into a bonanza.

“The corn-to-alcohol scheme may well be the largest single financial crime of all time,” says Global Research, an educational think-tank, “Its cost to consumers in higher food prices will exceed the total cost of the so-called war in Iraq, plus the cost of escalated oil prices. There cannot be a bigger is-sue than food. No problem in America comes close to it in importance, because no one can escape depending on food for survival — and we are talking about doubling or tripling the cost of basic grain commodities on which the non-rich survive.”

Cars should be powered by energy from the sun or hydrogen—not food grains. The elegant process of plant creation by photosynthesis should be re-served for humanity and the other animals that walk the earth.

We can go back to the theories of Thomas Malthus, 19th Century English demographer and political economist. He opined that the number of people the earth can sustain depends on the amount of food that can be grown. Sooner or later, it will simply be impossible to feed all the people and there will be mass starvation. Malthusians continue to warn that the disaster is al-most upon us.

Is there an answer for this? Sure there is. Tax the agribusiness giants instead of subsidizing them.

Subsidies began with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, in the depth of the Great Depression. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt, through the New Deal, to save the family farm by paying poor farmers not to raise crops thereby stabilizing food prices that were falling through the floor.

Through the decades, the small farmers were pushed out and the specter of corporate farming haunted America. Today, the family farm is all but gone, corporate agribusiness is aggressively robust and the subsidies are still there!
Every year, when the Farm Bill, now reaching into $300 billion, comes up for debate, the members of Congress make a Faustian deal. Those from non-farm states will vote for the subsidies if the farm state members vote for food stamps and other benefits for the poor thrown into the bill. The Presi-dent usually vetoes it and we wind up with a pot pourri.

Meanwhile, food riots are breaking out across the globe from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso, from China to Cameroon, and from Uzbekistan to the United Arab Emirates.

“What we are seeing is unprecedented,” says Catholic Relief Services food aid expert Lisa Kuennen-Asfaw. “If immediate needs are not met, and if resources and policies supporting increased agricultural production are not put in place soon, we are heading for a cascade of hunger the world over.”

Have a good day.